Afterward, after they had left the medical bay again and the android outside had gone back to silently sorting tools, Park turned on her side and began to cry. The tears never went down her face; they only rimmed the edges of her closed eyelids like hot glue. She felt empty, raw, scrubbed clean of her insides and packed to the brim with foam peanuts instead. Oh, Fulbreech, she thought. What did he think she saw? She thought back to what Natalya had said. You could observe, you could see and take in every little detail if you had to—but it meant nothing if you didn’t understand what you were looking at. She was like a scavenger back on Earth, a Dryad rooting around in the foliage and undergrowth, searching for artifacts that no longer meant anything. The hope was that these items could be valuable, that they could be bartered off in exchange for a few more days of survival—but the Dryads didn’t know what it was they were collecting. They didn’t know what the things really meant.

And it was a perilous situation. Just like hers. Yes, Park decided, the comparison was apt. Contrary to what Fulbreech thought, she couldn’t see anything. She was like a masked wild person, navigating the treacherous roots and traps of the Comeback. Bent over, fumbling around. Afraid to miss a step in the dark.

—

She’d asked Glenn, once, if he ever dreamt. “What happens when androids deactivate for the day?” she asked.

“We enter power-saving mode, generally,” he replied. “Our energy is rerouted to performing maintenance. Upkeep. Cleaning up and defragmenting what we’ve processed since the last time we deactivated.”

The human brain did the same thing, Park would think later. It shut down, went into restoration mode. Released gamma waves to repair the miniscule wear and tear of everyday life. It took the time to ingrain memories, clear out debris. Without sleep human beings went insane, or died. Robots, too, broke down into disrepair—or shut off altogether.

“But do you dream?” Park had repeated, back then. “Do you see things while you’re deactivated? What do you think about?”

Glenn had frowned, thinking. “I know the definition of a dream,” he said. “A vision that one experiences when one is asleep. But I don’t know what happens when I enter ‘sleep’ mode. Not in that way.”

“So you don’t see anything?”

He’d hesitated. “Not in a way that I can relay to a human.”

There was a long silence after that. She’d wanted to ask him to try, but that might have been going too far—she didn’t want to risk burning his circuits.

“If you have different programs running,” Park said later, “when you turn off, to reformat and process your memories—does that mean every time you wake up, it’s a different version of you?”